Chubby bat with wrapped wings
Black and grey · Flash
A plump cartoon bat with pointed ears, two round dot eyes and a small smiling mouth sits centred on the page, its wings folded down around the body. The outline is drawn in confident black ink with short hatching on the inner ears, wing membranes and belly, and the feet are sketched with small curled claws. The image is black ink on white paper with no colour.
Find an artist for thisTake it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.
A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Nobody in Morwick believed the bat had come with the storm, though that is how Old Hettie always began. It arrived on the lamp-room sill the night the Ardrossan trawler went missing, round as a loaf and holding its wings wrapped tight about itself like a woman pulling her shawl against the wet. Keeper Amos Tull wanted to shoo it out, but his granddaughter Nell set a saucer of milk beside it and said it looked frightened, and a frightened thing should be let be.
Keep reading
It stayed all through the autumn. It slept in the brass housing of the great lens, where the warmth from the lamp kept it fat and content, and when the sea fog came down thick enough to swallow the headland it would unfold itself just once, stretch those inky wings wide, and sail out over the rocks. Each time it came back before the light was lit. Each time the boats came home.
The spring the trawler men finally stopped sending boys to the lighthouse with their questions, Amos found the bat asleep on the rail with its wings drawn close and two small dots of eyes shut tight. He did not wake it. He climbed the stairs slowly, lit the wick himself, and left the window open a crack so the gull-feathered air could carry the bat's sleepy breathing out to sea, where the boats could hear nothing but the steady turning of the light.
More like this
From the plentytattoo archive, uploaded by a user. Is this your work? Ask for credit or removal.